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Melbourne Independent:About
Melbourne Independent is a source of information about everything to do with independent communities in Melbourne, Australia, from music to literature and everything inbetween. It can be used as a directory to find artists, bands and all sorts of other services. We want to connect these communities better as they all exist in common, as being independent from mainstream culture and society, but somewhat disjointed and obscure even to its contributors. We also aim to give recognition to independent artists, filmakers, musicians, etc, for the work they create and contribute. Melbourne Independent is hosted by Wikia, a wiki farm that hosts wikis covering specific information that Wikipedia doesn't contain. Part of the free culture movement, Wikia content is released under a free content license and operates on the Open Source MediaWiki software. Explore the existing communities at Wikia. Every person can edit content on Melbourne Independent. Aims, To Do We want to organise everything into roughly these 3 categories: * Information - This is where people can access information about everything to do with Melbourne's independent communities. It is to be organised in an encyclopedia format simmilar to Wikipedia and is to maintain relevance to Melbourne. * Listings - This is where people can find lists of things like bands, zines, etc. An example would be a band searching for other bands to play with them at a particular venue, they can use these listings to find other bands based on their expirience, style, format, etc. We have to establish how best to organise these listings, in the form of lists or categories? * Services - This is where people can search for services such as zine distros, film processing, art supplies, etc. Lots of these services within the independent community are word of mouth only, we hope we can connect people with the services they seek and services with appropriate people. Definitions The obvious questions arrise concerning definitions, what do we include, what don't we include, etc, so lets quickly go through a few basic definitions: * Independent - We're primarily concerned with the definition of artists, writers, musicians and other individuals as being independent of mainstream culture, media, resources, etc. * Communities - Whenever we refer to communities as in "Melbourne's independent communities" we're talking about all the people involved with a particular scene or community sharing a common interest in things such as art or music. * DIY - Do It Yourself, more of a ethos than anything else, a desire to do your own audio recordings with your own equipment or print your own literature with your own printer, etc. * Alternative - We'd prefer to use the term independent as the term alternative could mean any alternate thing, its just far too broad a term, not that independent isn't, but it basically means the same thing. * Subcultures - These may be movements or groups that spring up and can be distinctly identified from other groups. They focus more on specific aspects of a particular culture whereas on this site we're concerned with every aspect on it. Notoriety This will hopefully give you some guidelines as to what you should and shouldn't include on the site, particularly regarding bands, musicians, artists and other people. Remember they only have to be noteworthy within the communities. People We could go so far as to include information about every individual, musicians, artists, photographers, etc, contributing to these communities, but a good guide to go by is if a particular person plays in a few bands or cuts a stencil once in a while, its not going to benefit other people by including them here, but if you run your own distro or organise gigs for bands its going to be beneficial for people to know you are. This also goes for street artists, they should only be included if they're taking their work seriously and not if they're just posting a couple of posters down the lane once a year. Bands With bands its a little bit different because your particular style of music may be sought after by someone out there who doesn't yet know you exist! But if you've only played a few gigs, or none, and your inexpirienced its probably best to work on honing your abilities before you seek promotion or listing yourselves in a directory like this. We do however encourage obscure and unknown bands to contribute information about themselves to the site, but if you don't have links to a website or MySpace and make up some random info that can't be verified by more than just the band then obviously your contributions will be removed. Article Format As we grow we'll get some good examples of how we want our articles to look but for now we're looking for basic information and things like if an artist is still active or not, if a band has disbanded or a zine is out of print, etc. Changes, Progressions, Growth Hopefully we do grow to encompass as much information as we can so we can become a genuinely valuable resource, so along the way we're going to outgrow old articles, categories and lists and need to create new ones. The best way to do this is if there is an article with a subsection that has a huge mass of information and words and you can think of even more stuff that needs to be included, create a new article! The same goes for creating new sections and subsections within articles. What I'll do very first up is include sections and subsections to encourage information to be put into them. Spelling and Grammar Obviously, try to use spell check or proof read it, we're not as big as wikipedia and so we don't have heaps of people just waiting to correct spelling mistakes and minor errors so lets try and get it right from the start. Distant Future Growth We can already see instances where we'll have to include other cities and states within Australia and perhaps overseas such as when musicians relocate to Melbourne from interstate. Each particular state, city have their own localised communities and we'd like to see other wikis start up to cover them. An Australian Independent wiki would perhaps be too broad to be effective and would preferably only exist as a link between all independent communities within Australia.